2017 IEEE MTT-S International Conference on Microwaves for Intelligent Mobility (ICMIM)
Hand-Gesture Sensing Doppler Radar with
Metamaterial-Based Leaky-Wave Antennas
Ssu-Ting Huang
RF and Technical Service Center,
Wistron Neweb Corporation
Hsinchu, Taiwan
tiffany.huang@wnc.com.tw
Abstract—This paper presents a Doppler radar with
metamaterial-based leaky-wave antennas for the hand-gesture
sensing application. Since the antenna main beam of the
developed radar can be arbitrarily pointed to a known azimuth
angle, the hand gesture moving in the decomposed orthogonal
directions can be successfully detected. In addition, the phase
information caused by the hand gesture is accurately retrieved to
calculate the distance of the hand movement.
Keywords—Doppler radar; gesture sensor; metamaterial-based
leaky-wave antenna; scanning antenna;
I. INTRODUCTION
Since a microwave radar system can detect the range and
velocity of the subject under test through obstacles in an indoor
environment, recently, the radar technology is attractive to be
applied in the hand-gesture sensing [1]-[4]. For smart car
applications, the hand-gesture sensing radar has the potential to
realize the noncontact control of navigation and entertainment
devices in the vehicles. As compared with gesture sensing
based on the optical sensors, the radar-based sensor avoids the
influence of the ambient light condition and reduces the
process time. Combined with the monopulse technology, the
frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar in [2]
was employed to obtain the range-Doppler map (RDM), and
then applied to recognize different hand gestures. However,
this approach requires a higher operating frequency to improve
the system resolution, and needs a complicated signal process
to form a 3-dimensional RDM. To simplify the radar
architecture and reduce the signal process time, in [3], the
Doppler radar with the barcode classification method was used
to recognize hand gestures. Since this radar system worked at
2.4-GHz ISM band, the interference with other wireless signals
was a big concern, and the trajectory of the hand movement
was still unknown. To solve aforementioned problems, in [4],
an ambient Wi-Fi signal was retransmitted via an injection-
locked Doppler radar with a quadrature receiver to detect hand
gestures. By recovering the measured phase information, the
accurate distance of the hand movement can be obtained in [4].
All the hand-gesture sensing radars in [1]-[4] adopted high-
gain antennas with fixed main beams. They abandoned the
spatial detection freedom of the azimuth angle. In [5], two
metamaterial-based scanning leaky-wave antennas were
applied to be the transmitting and receiving antennas of the
vital-sign Doppler radar. When two human adults sat at
978-1-5090-4354-5/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
49
Chao-Hsiung Tseng
Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering,
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology
Taipei, Taiwan
chtseng@ieee.org
Fig. 1. Application scenario of the hand-gesture sensing Doppler
radar with metamaterial-based scanning leaky-wave antennas.
different azimuth angles, their respiration and heartbeat rates
can be effectively distinguished and detected. In this paper, a
Doppler radar system with the ability of azimuth angle
scanning is proposed as shown in Fig. 1 for the hand-gesture
sensing application. The antenna main beam of the proposed
radar system can be arbitrarily pointed to a known azimuth
angle, φ, by adjusting the frequency of the radio-frequency
source. Hence, the wave number of the electromagnetic wave
propagation can be determined. The wave number and the
measured recovering phase response can be utilized to
calculate the accurate distances of hand movement in two
orthogonal directions, namely x and y directions as illustrated
in Fig. 1.
II. METAMATERIAL-BASED SCANNING ANTENNA
The scanning leaky-wave antenna [6] is designed and
fabricated in the two-layered FR4 substrate with a dielectric
constant of 4.4, a loss tangent of 0.02, and thicknesses of
h1=0.2 mm and h2=1.23 mm. Moreover, Fig. 2 (a) and (b) show
the physical dimensions, 3-dimensional view, and equivalent
circuit of the composited right-/left-handed (CRLH) unit cell,
which is composed of two series MIM capacitors and one shunt
short-circuited stub. The CRLH unit cell is simulated by the
electromagnetic simulator, Keysight Momentum, and its
physical dimensions are determined as L1=3.92 mm, L2=1.45
mm, W=2.98 mm, s=0.31 mm, g1=1.13 mm, g2=0.69 mm, and
w=0.41 mm. Moreover, by applying the extraction method in
[7], the component values of the equivalent circuit are
determined as CR=0.597 pF, LR=1.495 nH, CL=0.511 pF,
LL=1.275 nH. The photograph of 30-cell scanning leaky-wave
antenna is shown in Fig. 2 (c). One end of the antenna is
 2017 IEEE MTT-S International Conference on Microwaves for Intelligent Mobility (ICMIM)
Fig. 2. (a) Unit-cell structure, and its (b) 3-dimensional view and
equivalent circuit of the metamaterial-based scanning leaky-wave
antenna. (c) The photograph of the developed 30-cell leaky-wave
antenna.
Fig. 3. Measured H-plane (xz-plane shown in Fig. 2 (c)) radiation
patterns of the developed CRLH scanning leaky-wave antenna at 5.1
GHz, 5.8 GHz, and 6.5 GHz.
terminated by a 50-Ω load. The other end will be connected
with the transmitting or receiving port of the hand-gesture
sensing Doppler radar.
Fig. 3 shows the measured H-plane (x-z plane shown in Fig.
2 (c)) radiation pattern of the developed scanning leaky-wave
antenna at 5.1 GHz, 5.8 GHz, and 6.5 GHz, and their
corresponding main beam directions are -33°, -1° and , 26°,
respectively. Hence, as the frequency increases from 5.1 GHz
to 6.5 GHz, this antenna provides an azimuth scanning capacity
of 59°. Theoretically, the main beam of the metamaterial-based
scanning antenna can sweep from end-fired to broadside
direction. However, limited by the frequency tuning range of
the VCO in the radar module, only the radiation patterns
between 5.1 GHz and 6.5 GHz are measured and presented.
Moreover, the antenna gains are 5 dBi, 7.1 dBi, and 6.8 dBi at
5.1 GHz, 5.8 GHz, and 6.5 GHz, respectively.
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Fig. 4. (a) System block diagram and (b) the photograph of the
developed Doppler radar module.
III. DOPPLER RADAR MODULE CIRCUITRY
The system block diagram and the photograph of the
Doppler radar module are shown in Fig. 4 (a) and (b),
respectively. The radio-frequency (RF) signal of the radar
module is provided by a VCO with a frequency tuning range of
5.1-6.5 GHz. After amplified by a driver amplifier, a half of the
RF power is transmitted into the air via a transmitting antenna.
The other half of the transmitting signal is coupled into the
receiving link for the Doppler frequency demodulation. As the
radiating wave hits the moving hand, the wave will be phase
modulated and scattered back to the radar. The backward
scattered field will be received by the receiving antenna and
then amplified by the two-stage low-noise amplifier (LNA).
This modulated RF signal is then sent into an IQ mixer to
acquire the I- and Q-baseband signals. To preserve the
information contained in baseband DC signal, the DC-coupled
architecture is adopted in this paper. Finally, I- and Q-baseband
signals are digitized and presented in the digital oscilloscope.
The digital signals are acquired for the further digital signal
processing using the MATLAB programming language.
IV. RADAR SIGNAL PROCESSING
Referring to the hand-gesture sensing scenario shown in
Fig. 1, as the hand pushes approaching to the radar system, the
digitized I- and Q-channel baseband signals under the DC-
coupled condition [8] can be expressed as
 4π xm [n ] 
BI ,m [n ] = AI ,m [n ]cos  + Δθ  + DC I ,m [n ]
 λ  (1)
m = 1, 2, 3,; n = 1, 2, 3,
 2017 IEEE MTT-S International Conference on Microwaves for Intelligent Mobility (ICMIM)

Fig. 5. (a) Measured time-domain I/Q signals as the hand waves

approaching to the radar, and (b) their trajectories in I-Q plane.

 4π xm [n ] 
BQ ,m [n ] = AQ ,m [n ]s in  + Δθ  + DCQ ,m [n ]
 λ  (2)
m = 1, 2, 3,; n = 1, 2, 3,
where xm[n] is the distance of the hand movement, λ is the
wavelength of the operating frequency of the Doppler radar, Δθ
is the residual phase, AI,m[n] and AI,m[n] are amplitudes of the
measured signals of the I and Q channels, DCI, m and DCI, m are
dc offsets of the I and Q channels. Fig. 5 (a) shows the Fig. 6. (a) Measurement setup of the “hand pushing” gesture
measured time-domain I/Q signals and their trajectories in I-Q sensing. (b) Measured time-domain I- and Q-signals and (c)
plane. As can be seen, the I- and Q-signals are amplitude- compensated phase response.
modulated along with the distance varying between the hand
and radar. In addition, accompanied with the hand location MATLAB to fit each segment data, and determine the center
change, the dc offsets of the I- and Q-signals are also varied. location and radius of this fitting circle.
Hence, the spiral-shape trajectories in the IQ plane are 3) Compensate dc offsets and normalize the amplitude of each
presented in Fig. 5 (b). segment data using (3) and (4). One can then obtain
To calibrate the dc offset and normalize the amplitude, the compensated and normalized components RI [n] and RQ [n].
radar signal processing approach in [8] is adopted in this paper BI [n ] − DCI [n ]  4π x[n ] 
to demodulate the phase information from the measured I- and RI [ n ] = = cos  + Δθ  (3)
Q-signals. The process steps are summarized as follows. AI [n ]  λ 
1) Divide the measured signal shown in Fig. 5 (a) into m BQ [n ] − DCQ [n ]  4π x[n ] 
RQ [n ] = = sin  + Δθ  (4)
segments. In this paper, m is set to 16. The amplitude change in AQ [n ]  λ 
each data segment keeps minimal to retain the accuracy.
4) Demodulate the phase angle using (5) and unwrap the phase
2) Plot the I- and Q-signals of each segment data in the IQ response. One can calculate the distance, l, of the hand
plane, and then use the “least square optimization” function in
movement by ϕ=kl, where k is the wave number in the hand
movement direction.

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 2017 IEEE MTT-S International Conference on Microwaves for Intelligent Mobility (ICMIM)
Fig. 7. (a) Measurement setup of the “hand parallel waving” gesture
sensing. (b) Measured time-domain I- and Q-signals and (c)
compensated phase response.
 RQ [n ] 
ϕ [n ] = tan −1   (5)
 RI [ n ] 
V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
As the frequency of the VCO is set to 6.5 GHz, the antenna
main beam of the radar points to the azimuth angle, φ=26°. In
this case, the wave number, k, can be decomposed into two
orthogonal directions, namely, kx=kcosφ and ky=ksinφ. In this
paper, the sensing results of two hand gestures, namely “hand
pushing” shown in Fig. 6 (a) and “parallel hand waving”
shown in Fig. 7 (a) are presented to demonstrate the
effectiveness of the developed radar and its signal processing
method. For the “hand pushing” gesture, the hand moves in
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the –y-direction approaching to the radar with a distance of 20
cm. The measured time-domain I- and Q-signals are shown in
Fig. 6 (b). As can be seen, I-signal leads Q-signal. The
measured raw data are compensated by the processing method
in Section IV, and the demodulated phase results are illustrated
in Fig. 6 (c). The phase varies from 0° to 2783°. Using ϕ=kyl,
one can obtain the distance of hand movement is 19.8 cm with
a 1 % measurement error. For the “parallel hand waving”
gesture, the hand waves in the –x-direction with a distance of
20 cm. The measured time-domain I- and Q-signals and the
demodulated phase results are shown in Fig. 7 (b) and (c),
respectively. The phase difference of 1571° corresponds to a
hand movement of 22.6 cm with a 13 % error.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, the developed hand-gesture sensing Doppler
radar with metamaterial-based leaky-wave antennas is applied
to detect the gestures, “hand pushing” and “parallel hand
waving”. The distance of the hand movement is also accurately
estimated. In addition, the gestures “hand pulling” and “parallel
waving” in the opposite direction are successfully validated in
our laboratory. The proposed radar system has the potential to
extend as a 3-dimensional hand-gesture radar.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by the National Science Council
of Taiwan under Grant MOST 105-2221-E-011-028. The
authors also thank the National Chip Implementation Center
(CIC), Hsinchu, Taiwan, for the PCB fabrication.
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